Mind Uploading

There seems to be a great lack of discussion about the correlation between ST:TOS "Return To Tomorrow" and the current Mind Uploading and Brain Mapping projects underway.

I would not mind being 'Uploaded' into a computer, like Sargon and Thalassa. But I would prefer later be downloaded into a new 20-year-old, 3D bio-printed clone (my DNA) body, rather than into an android body - as they had in mind.

I see one big reason why mind uploading might be practically infeasible and completely useless excercise.

There is no reason for it to be impossible, of course. The mind, the consciousness, and what defines you as you are nothing more than information, and so naturally the information can be stored and recreated at will. In theory.

However, there is one big obstacle. Unlike a computer, where there is a clear distinction between software and hardware, in a human there is no distinction between the brain and the mind. A lot of the information that defines you as a person is probably rooted in the structure of the brain, and in the way it functions. It might be impossible to separate the two, and it might be that your mind is so tuned to your own brain that you need a full physical simulation of your entire brain to copy it. Worse yet, it might turn out that the copy of your brain deteriorates just as easily as your real brain, making such a copy useless. Or that it becomes a completely different person because the simulation is inexact.

Finding ways to physically preserve the brain and stop any brain deterioration might be a much more meaningful task. I still don't see how copying it to a computer helps you much with anything. And if you want to make copies of yourself, making physical copies might turn out to be simpler.

Not to deny uploading your mind to a computer completely – it might turn out to be one of the possibilities, but I don't think we need to focus on it when there are much more promising things to do with our brains.

Besides, why? We die to leave the world to the next generations. I don't see a particular reason to stick around forever. Although I would not mind getting frozen for a couple of hundred or thousand years right before my death to see the future in my final weeks.

My mind uploaded to a computer would just not be me, it would be a copy of me. My mind is an emergent property of my brain, it's not something tangible that can be transferred.

And once that copy of my mind is uploaded to a computer, then what? Eternal virtual reality? Robotic body? Disembodied consciousness? What if some sociopathic 12-year-old gets a pirated copy of your mind on his computer and decides to torture it?

There should be no difference. You are the information, not the vessel.

Click to expand...

The difference is that I can exist along with the copy. That makes me the original. The copy is not. It may think it's me, but it will not be the same thing. I am not the information, I am the emergent consciousness that rises from how that information interacts with it's vessel.

I think it might have to do with how slowly the transfer takes place. from the brain transplant wiki:

"In 1982 Dr. Dorothy T. Krieger, chief of endocrinology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, achieved notable success with a partial brain transplant in mice.
A partial brain transplant could accomplish essentially the same goal — movement of a person's "identity" from one body to another — and thus qualify as a whole-body transplant no less than a full brain transplant."

"As Dr. Krieger demonstrated, barriers to accomplishing this feat might be much lower than transplantation of the entire brain."

Now if this were a chip and you had, say, a debilitating condition, functions of the brain would slowly be transfered over without you ever losing consciousness.

Now if a duplicate program from that were flash transmitted--THAT would be the ex nihlo copy.